Integrated circuits are generally mass produced by a design company and sold to client companies. In designing the integrated circuit, engineers at the design company use computer-aided tools to develop an electronic mask set, which represents different layers of the integrated circuit. This electronic mask set is then used to generate a set of physical masks, which are in turn used to fashion features on different layers of a physical integrated circuit during the manufacturing process.
After a client company receives the integrated circuit, the client company may need to modify the integrated circuit to make it more suitable for a particular application or environment. Consequently, after studying the electronic mask set or the physical integrated circuit, engineers at the client company can propose edits to be implemented on the integrated circuit. These edits can be sent to the design company via email, a web interface or other means of communication.
After receiving the proposed edits, engineers at the design company then manually evaluate the electronic mask set in view of the proposed edits and conduct a feasibility study. In a feasibility study, the engineers may first determine whether the proposed edits are even possible, and then assuming they are possible, the engineers may characterize the proposed edits as aggressive or conservative. Such evaluations generally are manually performed, wherein the engineers use their own knowledge of integrated circuit design rules and milling procedures to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed edits. After conducting this feasibility study, the design company can make the proposed edits on the actual integrated circuit via focused ion beam (FIB) milling technology.
However, numerous disadvantages arise when attempting to manually determine whether a particular integrated circuit edit is feasible. For example, because engineers rely on personal experience and their own integrated circuit editing knowledge, which may be limited or incomplete, engineers usually are unable to thoroughly and efficiently analyze an integrated circuit to determine whether a proposed edit is truly feasible. Further, if a proposed edit is determined to be unfeasible, engineers may find it difficult to suggest a viable alternative to the proposed edit, even though a viable alternative may exist. Often, visually inspected edits are rejected based solely on an engineer's impression of the difficulty level of the proposed edit, even though such an edit may have a reasonable chance for success. For these and other various reasons, engineers often cannot accurately determine the probability of a successful integrated circuit edit, and are often unable to consistently provide viable alternatives to unsuitable, proposed integrated circuit edits.